


sunny place

by EasyPeasyPanic



Series: my darker fics [8]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Author Is Sleep Deprived, Blood, Grief/Mourning, Hanahaki Disease, I was in a danzou mood sorry guys, I'll add more tags when I'm awake k bye, Implied/Referenced Character Death, It just makes things difficult sometimes, Just a Mention, M/M, Mention of a surgery but not anything graphic, Sunflowers, Unrequited Love, you can still love someone even if they're dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-27
Updated: 2020-05-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:28:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24401329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EasyPeasyPanic/pseuds/EasyPeasyPanic
Summary: Danzou lets out a soft huff of laughter.A week after the man he loves died, he's spitting up petals.
Relationships: Senju Tobirama/Shimura Danzou
Series: my darker fics [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1657405
Comments: 3
Kudos: 41





	sunny place

**Author's Note:**

> guys i just really like the hanahaki disease and I really like danzou 
> 
> Also idk but I just felt sunflowers would suit Danzou, they'd really go with his eyes
> 
> (for my friend Jay, because she loves sadness apparently.)

* * *

It happens a week after his death, if that makes any sort of sense. 

One moment he's fine, or as fine as he can manage to be with the steady thrum of jealousy and rage filling his blood like a new sort of poison, and then he's not fine. It happens in a matter of seconds, storming out of Sensei-- no _, Hiruzen's_ office. The soft click of the door that he had wanted to slam, the halting moment when he swings back around (maybe to go back and fight again, or maybe to apologize to his oldest friend). The faint glance of the new photographs lining the wall, the ones that were taken recently. One of the Shodai. One of Tobirama. 

And then Danzou isn't fine anymore. He's not fine when he spits out small yellow petals that taste of dirt in his mouth. He sputters, wiping it off his mouth, the small and offending thing. And it doesn't register to him what he's staring at, just a soft yellow petal the size of a small coin. 

(Senju Hashirama's presence, even years after his demise, still echoed throughout his office in the thrum of his foreign chakra that settled into the wood. During the spring, soft vines would crawl through the cracks of the ceiling, and during the summer, small blooms would creep up between the tatami until they had to be replaced with a different flooring. Petals weren't uncommon, and it isn't surprising to find them settled in hair, clothing, or to accidentally breath them in during one's time in the Hokage's presence.)

He stares at it, the tiny thing that begins to fall apart in his hand from his rough touch, and then blinks back up around the hallway, searching for the cause. If the vines and flowers were creeping further out of the Hokage's office, perhaps the entire ceiling would need to be replaced with a less organic material until the late Shodai's chakra faded away.

There's nothing.

He tastes dirt in his mouth. No, not dirt, but something familiar. The aftertaste he'd get after the civilians would trim their fields, the scent of cut grass, but he can't place it. 

Another petal comes out of his mouth. It's slick with spit. A soft, strange tickle in his throat, and he has to cough it out because it was lodged somewhere, but it comes out easily. Yellow petals in the middle of his palm--

Oh. _Oh._

Danzou lets out a soft huff of laughter. Throws the damn things down in anger at the irony before he composes himself, because he isn't allowing himself to be as foolish and headstrong as he was only a week ago, not after all it cost him. Of course, this would happen now.

A week after the man he loves died, he's spitting up petals. 

**_____ **

It doesn't hurt, originally. It doesn't hurt until it does. It starts little ways, things just out of his control. One session with Torifu leaves him gasping a little faster than usual, but it doesn't feel like anything more than the usual tiredness of a rough spar, even if it isn't all that strenuous. 

Spasms of his lungs that send him gasping and groaning, but nothing painful. It's fluttering, like wings inside his chest, even if he knows it isn't.

(It's roots, slowly sinking into tissue, little by little, tiny little things that'll get bigger and bigger and go _deeper_ , even if it means tearing apart his lungs. Like that office in the Tower, the flowers will find every nook and cranny of his body and dig in tightly to thrive. And his body's trying to handle it without much fuss, and for now, it'll be alright.)

He can handle little things, even if he doesn't want to, even if he knows those will turn to the worse things, the new pains. It becomes more consistent to find himself with a mouthful of petals to a flower that Danzou can't readily identify because he's never been too fond of needless things like flora. 

Shinobi die many ways. It's one of the first things he had been taught, even before he had been an Academy student, even as a young boy being guided through his clan's burial grounds only a year before the peace treaty and the village. Danzou remembers blood splattered against the ground, the squelch of flesh being ripped through, the smell of charred skin that made him gag, and dozens upon dozens of ways to die that were considered right no matter how horrific. Most of the deaths he's seen happened out of love, out of the grand desire to _protect_. To throw one's self in front of a blade to allow someone else to live, to run headfirst into danger to know your beloved would be safe in the village you were fighting for; everything always somehow came back down to _love_ . Love for a person, a place, a friend, _love and love and--_

Tobirama died of love, too. More specifically, Danzou knows that he died from any toss up of causes, most likely blood loss from any multitude of combat injuries, but the emotional part of him knows that his teacher wouldn't have volunteered to be their decoy if he hadn't loved them all enough to value their lives above his own. 

It seems Danzou is following him into the grave. Because there are petals falling from chapped lips right now, bright yellow with a soft brush of pink at the edges. It was easier to deny this was happening originally when it was just one or two petals, but now he spits them out constantly. Sooner or later, he'll be choking them up as full flowers. Because he's in love with a dead man, and it might have been less painful before to have loved Tobirama-sensei when he was alive because he would have been _alive_. 

The results would have been the same, he has absolutely no doubts about that. Dead or alive, there wasn't a version of this that ended in a happy ending. Tobirama wouldn't have been capable of giving him the type of love he wanted so desperately. Danzou knew he wasn't the one that he loved, not in the romantic way that he's always hoped for. It hadn't been difficult to see the difference in quiet affection pointed towards himself (fond, easy, a touch fatherly) and those _side glances_ he'd given to Kagami, sometimes to Hiruzen. The lingering stares, the extra training sessions that had always made him wonder and ache and crave the same intimacy, even if it had been imagined. (It hadn't been, right?) But at least there would've been some sort of desperate, ugly hope to cling to that perhaps it could be requited. 

A corpse offered no such chance.

Danzou would have been pleased to have choked to death in a pool of blood and roots and blossoms if his sensei was still alive. Because he could've spent his remaining time with him, at his side, even if he didn't return his feelings, because he would have _been there_. His warmth, his reserved smile, his saucy jokes that were only spoken in the privacy of his team. He would be alive and well, and that's all Danzou wants right now is just to be able to speak to him, to see him, to train under him once more time. Danzou's heart wouldn't ache with loss alongside useless love, and his grief wouldn't need to be split between himself for slowly dying and mourning Tobirama-sensei.

(He should've spoken up. He should've been brave. Less cowardly. Danzou should've volunteered before his teammate, he should've impressed his teacher and died for him, because at least that way he could've earned Tobirama's love for a brief moment in awe of his sacrifice. This way-- this way of dying (this pining) was pathetic and shameful.)

He holds them in his hands, still unsure of what type of flower they are, although they seemed familiar. So familiar, but nameless and pathetic and shameful. And so dangerous, a foreboding to his future. 

Torifu calls for him from across the field. His face was so earnest and open, and for a moment, he almost regretted not being able to tell him. If anyone in this world would understand him without need for justification or cause, it would be the kind-hearted Akimichi with their open hearts. 

But he has little need for softness right now. He's in far too much grief, far too much pain at his sensei's loss and his own impending death. His feelings are a messy mixture that didn't need to be shared, not that he would ever be able to bring himself to share them. 

"Danzou?" Torifu's waving. There's a gourd of water in his hand, like the one sitting by Danzou's side. Untouched. "Are you ready yet? Or do you want to stop for today?" 

He crushes the petals in his palm, rubs them off his hands onto the sun-dried grass. The scent makes him ill to his stomach, but he swallows it down, and forces his legs to stand shakily. Draws his kunai, because despite this, he can't afford to be weak now. 

He's a shinobi, an asset to his village, he has a _purpose_ . The war outside these walls doesn't care about his broken heart or his grief for a dead teacher, nor would it stop because his body's been taken over by an illness. If he's going to serve his village well, he'll have to continue to train and _live_ and fight, because that's his purpose and his duty. 

"I'm ready." He replies, preparing to attack. 

**_____ **

His lungs ache worse when he's alone. 

It's a steady pain. Like a knife being slowly stuffed under his skin, deep into the tissue. His breaths come in drawn out gasps and painful wheezes, and it gets so much worse. 

_So much_ worse. At night, when the summer air is hot and dry and unkind to already tender airways, he can't bring himself to sleep anymore. It hurts too much. He focuses on trying to work past the pain that feels like thousands of shards of glass stuffed inside of him, or of trying to rid himself of the lingering taste of iron on his tongue. 

Symptoms are more intense when there's reminders or the presence of the person the infected love, Danzou recalls learning during the mandatory emergency medicine classes during the Academy. To the point where some infected with the disease couldn't even be in the same room as a picture of the person in case they saw it. Being around them caused the roots to dig in deeper, but thankfully he doesn't have that issue. 

There's a picture of his team on his desk. It's one of the few sentimental items that Danzou has ever had, one of the few things he treasures. It hurts worse to see it each day and each night, almost mocking him with the smiles across the gleaming glass. And then there's sensei in the front, his pale lips in a small smile, arms crossed. Amused at them, those idiotic children they used to be before the war began. 

He should get rid of it, he knows. Danzou aches worse, _feels_ the disease spreading with each lingering glance at the familiar red eyes and fond gaze of the picture, but he can't bring himself to do it. 

A lovestruck fool and a coward. 

A coward in all things, too much of a coward to volunteer himself as a decoy, too much of a coward to throw away a picture that was worsening his symptoms. Because he's afraid of losing the last piece of his sensei that he has left, that one day his memory of the man would fade and without this photograph, he'd be completely gone. It was wrong, he knew that, and pathetic, but he'd suffer through the wheezing if only to cling to the sight of his sensei. He was _dead_ , gone. Ripped away from him, and it hurt. It ached. He grieved his loss every moment of every day, and he can't bring himself to destroy that stupid picture. 

Danzou couldn't throw the damn thing away. 

He wheezes pathetically, and swallows down mouthfuls of blood. 

**_____ **

And then, one morning, just as the sun is rising in the sky, he coughs. 

And coughs. His body tenses in adrenaline-induced panic when air refuses to go down his lungs because something's stuck, and his body jerks. He coughs and hacks, trying to force his body to _work, please, get out, I can't--_

But it isn't coming out. It isn't petals, it's too big, he's choking. Every little inhale through his nose for lungs that burn and scream cause it to flutter out back further, making every cough useless, and Danzou claws at his throat. He chokes and gasps around it, and his body heaves with the effort and he's going to die. He's going to die. He's going to die. 

He gags. Coughs hard, pounding at his own chest, and his head spins. It's spinning and his vision is beginning to black out, and he can't...can't…

Air floods him with a final jerk. The taste of bile and dirt and something coppery fills his mouth along with something _wide_ and soft and sharp, and he hacks it out. Spits it onto the floor he's collapsed on, gasping for fresh and spitting out a mess of light pink around small yellow petals. 

A flower. There's a flower on his floor. Shaky hands reach out for it, and it's big. It's so big, so wide, and so _painfully_ bright. Oh. 

His throat hurts, a soft stinging that he's never felt before, an ache he won't be able to escape from now that there are blooms. Now that there are full flowers coming up, and it's getting worse _so quickly_ , and he's going to die soon. He's going to _die._ Danzou collapses, face against the floorboards. A sunflower, he's growing sunflowers inside his chest. 

Which he thinks is almost fitting, because he had always believed glorified his teacher, always thought Tobirama-sensei had personally hung the sun in the sky. 

At the very least, he can confirm that the man put sunflowers in his lungs. 

**_____ **

He goes to Kagami about it when it gets worse. Well, not about _it_ , but about the flower. It takes some time to dig through his generous supply, to find one that isn't crumbled from his temper tantrums or soaked in bright blood at the edges, but once he does, he presents it to Kagami for inspection. 

"It's so pretty." Kagami traces his finger through the middle, going in a swirl design across it. He isn't much of an expert in flowers, but his mother had a generous garden that she often wrangled him into helping with so he's Danzou's best choice for questioning. 

(And if he also needs the comfort of a friend in his time suffering, that's his own business completely.)

"Is it big or small for a sunflower?" His voice was raw, and he had to swallow a mouthful of blood to get them out. 

Kagami blinks at him curiously, and then back the blossom in his hands. "Small, I think? We don't really have sunflowers, but Mom told me once a sunflower that was twenty-four inches in diameter." He motions at his friend to sit with him on the ground, and Danzou collapses uselessly down with heavy limbs that are cold to the touch. He's been trying different methods to try and breathe better, but so far he's failing if his numb, blue-tinted fingertips are any indication. 

And if these were small, he couldn't imagine trying to hack up a big one. His throat was stinging and scraped raw from these few he's been trying to choke up now, and Danzou can't imagine trying to get anything bigger out right now. His head spins and he feels flushed, but if he's looking off, Kagami says nothing about it. 

"Are you gardening now, Dan?" Kagami asks, teasingly. His dark eyes are bright with soft affection and teasing glee, and his nose crinkles when he smiles so familiar that it makes Danzou ache worse. "I thought you said it was too girly."

Danzou shakes his head, even though it feels full of lead and airy at the same time. He tries to find a suitable excuse, a suitable lie, something witty and maybe slightly mean to sound like himself. Nothing comes to mind. 

"We all need hobbies. Especially during these...times."

Kagami's face hardens up, "True." He shifts, letting their knees brush against each other's. Pain settles onto his face, a mixture of old grief and slight panic, and he presses close. "Did you hear? About what Iwagakure threatened?"

"No."

"They've got some talent in seals, especially when making explosive tags. There's been rumors that they've threatened our borders, and our supply routes with bombings. It's all hands on deck now." Kagami settles his head onto Danzou's shoulder, shaking it softly. His curly hair tickled his nose, but he forced himself to hold back any movement, because even a soft sneeze could cause petals to appear. And to let Kagami see his weakness, to have to explain that his love for his teacher was still _there_ and still growing with each beat of his heart even after Tobirama's death; well, he could only handle so much before falling apart. 

Danzou nods along, swallowing hard. His body jerked a little, inadvertently, as a cough tried to escape him, but he forced his lips shut. It comes out more like a soft whine, but not enough to alert Kagami. His lips taste of blood still, though it still might be because of how chapped they were from the constant abuse of petals and spittle. 

"I'm glad we're all still here. Our team." Kagami continues on, rambling on. His dark eyes are fixed on the bright blue sky above them, like he can see something there in the clouds that Danzou _can't_. 

His attention shifts from between the Uchiha's word and trying to relax his muscles into submission. He can't cough, can't move too quickly for fear of feeling the roots dig further and further into his insides, like jagged knives through his body. His throat aches as something lodges there, but he swallows down the sunflower as best he can. 

"It isn't the same, _now_ since Sensei died. Everything seems a lot more dangerous and lonely. But we have each other." Kagami quiets down, and he sits up from against the Shimura boy's shoulder. "It still hurts, but I know why he did it. He loved us so much, and I want to honor his memory. We'll have to protect this village for Sensei, because it was so important to him. Our way of showing how grateful we are for his sacrifice. Don't you think, Dan?"

Danzou nods jerkily. Offers a small smile to hide his blood-stained teeth, and swallows down a mouthful of stems beginning to dig their way up. 

It's the first thing that he's heard recently that makes any sort of sense. 

**_____ **

The medic wrings his hands once again. He glances up, across the small operating room towards his fellow healers, and then back down at Danzou.

"Shimura-san." He says, very deliberate. "I must ask you again, are you certain this is what you wish to do? You understand that--"

Danzou dismisses his concerns, shaking his head. "I know. This is what I'm going to do." He replies with finality, and the medical shinobi pauses. Bows his head. 

"I'm going to check on the paperwork to make sure we have approval and gather my supplies."

(Everything's in order. Such a procedure on a shinobi requires a sign off by the Hokage because of the long term psychological effects. Danzou has been playing Hiruzen since he was young, and it took very little effort to slip the form into the new Hokage's paperwork and get him to sign it without actually reading it.)

It has to be done quickly, the removal, because he's let it go on far too long as it was. His life was fading with each passing moment, and whatever they'd given him to drink was turning his entire body to a relieving numbness that almost made him lose the sense of _daggers_ going through up his trachea and down his lungs towards the very bottom of them. 

It's said that the reason so few healers found it necessary to learn to perform a flower removal from a victim of Hanahaki is that very few wished to be cured of the disease. Danzou wasn't sure if that was true, although he understood the sentiment well-enough. Love never returns, once the flowers are gone. Roots are pulled out, and feelings aren't weeds so they don't find a way back to grow again. The ability for such a strong emotion such as love is gone, and Danzou will be able to have it again, not even for his friends, not for Sensei, not for anything. 

Most people, far braver people than Danzou, chose their agonizing death rather than lose their ability to love. Rather than lose the feelings they hold for the person that doesn't love them back, they perish to a disease made of cruelty. But Danzou loves Tobirama-sensei still, too much, more than anything else. 

More than the village, even, which is why he was more than willing to die in the name of love, but Kagami reminded him of something he never considered. His duty, his _role_ , he should die for the village, which was under threats. Shinobi are designed to put their feelings aside, to be tools for the sake of clan and village, to slaughter and obey without remorse, and Danzou has been slipping away from that path. 

He's going to have that weakness removed from him today, to rid himself of the ability to falter and stray from his duty as a shinobi over feelings for a dead man. To honor Tobirama-sensei, he would protect Konohagakure with any means necessary, but he couldn't do that dead from roots eating away at him, so he couldn't die. 

(A small part of him had hoped that he would be reunited with his teacher when he died. That maybe in the afterlife, he'd be able to kiss pale lips and see real affection in red eyes, but Danzou knows it won't happen. Tobirama hadn't loved him like that, why would death change that? Why die for a man that didn't love him to begin with?)

It would make him a stronger, better shinobi. His grief, his anguish, this _loss_ would disappear once his love for Tobirama-sensei was gone, and Danzou needed it to. He needed to be able to focus on something else besides the feeling of having his _heart_ ripped out of his chest every morning when he rose to remember his teacher was dead. It felt like the world had dimmed and faded, and he wanted to spend his time curled up to try to fight off the ache of loss. He couldn't handle the grief of losing him, but if he didn't love him, then Sensei's death wouldn't plague him any longer. 

His eyelids are heavy. His head spun with the drugs going through him. It would be different when he awoke. He would be a better shinobi, one that could've volunteered to be decoy, one not held back by childish dreams of romance from a person who never wanted him anyway. 

Kagami was right, wasn't he? In his own way. If Danzou really _loved_ Tobirama, he should prove it by defending the village. 

Even if that means losing that very feeling. 

**_____ **

Later, with lungs full of air, Danzou has no issues striding to the desk in his apartment. In a single motion, he picks up the small frame, the sun light gleaming off his sensei's face. 

Without a second glance or a bit of hesitation, he throws the picture of his team away. 

* * *

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> this could've been written better but I haven't slept. 
> 
> 🤔🤔 but instead of sleeping, i could definately write more stuff about the escort unit, HMMMM


End file.
